Both works in last night’s Prom wrestled, in different ways, with mortality. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, the “Tragic”, may well have been in part the composer’s response to the death of a daughter and to the diagnosis of his own fatal heart disease. Messiaen’s Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, commissioned to commemorate the fallen of two world wars, actually depicts the resurrection of the dead to the accompaniment of bells, gongs and alleluias.

Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra gave us, for perfectly good reasons of programme planning, the resurrection before the death, conjuring Messiaen’s hieratic, austere vision with razor-sharp precision.

There was little slack, too, in the Mahler; indeed, Chailly drove through the first movement with a blistering energy.

The order of the second and third movements is much debated but it was rather a relief that Chailly prefers the more tranquil Andante moderato to follow such a relentlessly hectic reading.

The Scherzo and, of course, the finale return to the fray, yet in the latter Chailly projects the wider canvas: all life is here, as well as death, and right up to the end the outcome is held in delicate balance. The hammerblows of fate were delivered (by a triangle player with time on his hands) with a sledgehammer on a specially erected scaffold. Only the first two blows were heard (Mahler himself removed the third) but the theatricality of each ensured that they were overwhelming.

Death may be in the air in the finale, and there’s not much sign of a resurrection, but even the grisly shudder of the final bars could not quite extinguish the exhilaration of the movement’s epic sweep.